Proper placement of “trust logos” can make a huge difference in conversion rate.

Verisign recently published a study demonstrating that the “trust index” of your average web visitor is at a paltry 61.5 points out of a possible 100.

In other words, your average web visitor is extremely wary and rates the overall trust worthiness of unfamiliar websites just above an “F”.

It’s for this reason that many security & trust logos exist – they’re designed to bring outside credibility and reinforce that a new user can trust your website.

Most of the big players in the trust logo space offer a litany of studies demonstrating how simply adding their logo will improve your website conversion rate.

We’ve found, however, that proper placement of your trust logo can make a significant difference in how much the conversion rate will improve.

Many websites tend to place their trust symbols in two places:

At the top of the page

Under or next to their checkout form

SportChalet.com, for instance, places their trust images on the very bottom of their checkout form:

We’ve found, however, that placing your trust logo next to the most critical fields in your process can outperform placement anywhere else.

For example, on a recent project our client needed to collect both Social Security & Driver’s License information from their users.

Rather than leaving the symbol at the top of the page where it was originally placed, we moved the symbol closer to the crucial fields:

This simple, intuitive change led to nearly a 9% gain in the form’s conversion rate!

In the project referenced above, we increased the overall conversion rate by more than 65% using this trick and a variety of others, so make sure to contact us today if you’d like to drastically improve your conversion rate.

Our advice to SportChalet.com and other ecommerce sites would be to test their security symbols next to the user’s credit card information field to address the user’s fears at the point of transaction.

The bottom line is if you’ve spent the money on a security symbol, test the placement to drive substantially better results!

Hi Doug – Yes, they can get expensive. If you have a SSL certificate on your site (looks like you do have one from StartCom) you can usually get some kind of seal from your SSL provider. If not, there are other competitors to Verisign that may be more affordable. Hope that helps!

You are right about the importance of correct placement of a Trust Seal. Many website shoppers don’t consider security until they are asked for their credit card details – so one important place to reinforce trustworthiness is at the credit card detail stage.
One website saw a significant 28% increase in sales over an 8 week period (confirmed by A/B split testing) http://trust-verified.org/case-study-c/

About Conversion Voodoo

Our online optimization methodologies aren't based on theory. We've been in the trenches like you, creating and running online marketing campaigns for our clients for over 10 years.

Since the beginning, our clients' profits have gone through the roof -- accounting for more than 100 million dollars in sales.
Also visit our sister company for CEO Coaching and Consulting CEO VoodooContact us